Is it just my imagination or have my fan speeds increased since installing Mint 7? I previously had a Slackware-based distro on this box and it seems to me, but I cannot be absolutely certain (because I blew away the other distro), that my computer is making more fan noise. I have a CPU fan that can increase its speed depending on heat, and the power supply fan is also like this. I think my video card fan is single speed.

At any rate, I have checked the system resources and even when the CPU is idle at 1% the fans still seem to be running away. There are no wayward processes going and the CPU temperature seems to be normal. However, I do have lots of compiz effects happening. BTW, the CPU is an Athlon XP2500, it is not capable of being throttled.

I just wondered if anyone else has seen increased CPU temps and/or fan speeds with Mint 7 with respect of other OS's they have used....

Are the fans really running hard? X-sensors shows my fan at 2900 right now. The cpu is at 45C

I can't say what it was before because I built this system just for Mint 7 64 but, I did move the system out of my desk and into a component rack to give it some more air flow.I had wondered if it was running hot but with no history it's impossible for me to say. It's certainly cooler since I moved it.

I was using conky to monitor system load, I don't think it's right though. The system monitor tells a different story as far as Firefox goes.Conky says FF is using 3.20 Mb of ram while system monitor says 107.40 Mb and climbing which seems closer to normal for FF. "top" only says 3.20 also.

I don't know what's right? I can for sure say that most of the stuff in sensors is wrong. The fan speed is about all I can trust.

Go into your system's bios and see what the system health says in there. It's a lot closer to being correct than the "sensors" tools, at least on my system anyway.